Cletus C. Coughlin, senior vice president and policy adviser to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis president, welcomes attendees to the Nov. 13 Dialogue and introduces guest speakers B. Ravikumar, vice president, and YiLi Chien, senior economist, both of the St. Louis Fed's Research division.

Transcript:

Cletus Coughlin: Welcome to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, and welcome to tonight's Dialogue with the Fed which is Beyond Today's Financial Headlines. And welcome, also, to those who are watching this via the Internet. We're live webcasting this as well, so we're attempting to increase the audience as much as possible. Now, these discussions are intended to give attendees as well as the viewers the opportunity to learn about and discuss important economic and financial issues with Fed staff and to learn from Fed staff. We're hoping that we generate a significant dialogue at the end after the formal presentations.

Now, I'm Cletus Coughlin. I'm a senior vice president, and I'm the host and moderator for today's session. I spent a lot of time on the hors d'oeuvres. I hope you enjoyed them. Okay, good, you laugh at poor joke. Thank you, thank you, thank you very much. For our final dialogue of 2012, we have YiLi Chien, who is from Taiwan, who will present a discussion about one of the emerging giants that we're talking about today, and he'll talk about China. And our other speaker tonight is B. Ravikumar who is a native of India, and obviously he'll speak about economic developments in India.

Now, as I've suggested, we've designed this program to be a dialogue, that we want interaction, and what we'll find is that in the allotted time for the speakers they won't be able to cover all the issues and all the questions that you might have. So we would like to have you save those for the Q&A session at the end of our presentation. You'll find that they will hit on a whole bunch of hopefully significant and stimulating issues and probably generate some additional questions in your mind beyond the ones that you're already bringing here.

Now, these people are economists. So they're specialists in economics, they're not specialists in politics. And so to the extent possible, we want them as well as tonight's discussion to focus upon the economics. We have no special expertise in the politics, and we'll leave that to the politicians and other decision makers. However, what we'll see is that many of these issues that have been involved as these emerging giants have been emerging generate a whole bunch of economic as well as political issues that we as a society have to deal with.

Just one other little housekeeping thing. We will be sending out a post-event survey via e-mail tonight following the dialogue and asking for your candid feedback and any other types of things or other topics that you might want to see explored in the future. What we try to do is to match up the topics that are suggested with the experts that we have on staff. And obviously not every topic that you might want that we have experts on, but what we try to do is match those up as well as possible and allow for hopefully a very active give and take.

Now, let me—just so that we get to know you just a little bit better. We ask a question and you have little clickers in front of you. Obviously you don't have to answer these questions if you don't want to. But, you know, in some sense, one of the reasons for this program is for us to reach out into the community because we're this organization that not a lot of people know about necessarily. And so we're interested in whether this is the first time inside the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. And so if you'd just click on one for yes, two for no, and we'll learn a little bit about you here in a second. Okay? Anybody who can't decide whether or not they've been in here before? All right, good enough. So for 75 percent of you, this is your first time inside this federal building. You've been here before and a quarter of you haven't been here. So one of the things we are trying to do is reach more and more people, and so, one, we're delighted to have you back again, but we're also delighted to reach out and hopefully touch positively a few more people.

Now, there's just one other question that we have. And this is we're interested in what your occupation or your primary employment is. And hopefully within those nine categories you can find yourself. Some of you might be in a couple categories, but pick whichever one you want and then answer one through nine accordingly. Well, I might have cut one or two of you off. I'm sorry. But what we see here is those of you that are involved in financial activities or government, 27 percent of you are in category two, and the next highest category with roughly a quarter is the retireds and just plain tireds. I often times fit into the tired category as well.

But anyway, thank you very much. And, you know, we use this information to hopefully tailor the products that we're providing to you better.